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Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

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Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#31

Post by JoshTriplett »

nrclark wrote: post #22

I've never really understood "minutes" as a unit of build work. What kind of server are we talking about? What CPU? How much RAM? How fast is the storage access? Is my instance virtualized? And if so, do I have dedicated resources? I have a build that takes around 70 minutes on an 8-core i9 with 32 GB of RAM and M.2 SSDs. What does that translate into for Gitlab "minutes"?

What would be the most immediately understandable way to present that? Suppose they added new, faster servers in the future; what unit would make the most sense to offer that won't change in the future?

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#32

Post by jamesh-gl »

rumanator wrote: post #21
dmm wrote: post #12

This is only about seven builds per month for my Rust project, not too bad but something I'll have to keep in mind. Does anyone else think this is a Gitlab campaign against overuse of monomorphization in Rust projects? I just can't get myself to use Dyn...

> Does anyone else think this is a Gitlab campaign against overuse of monomorphization in Rust projects? No,not really. I mean, in healthy projects build times are dwarfed by the time it takes to run tests. In web development projects even the delivery and deployment steps dwarf build times.

GitLab Product Manager here - We’re working on ways to run fewer tests OR only the necessary tests earlier in a pipeline so you get to a result in fewer minutes. The first project towards this in the product is https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/merge_requests/fail_... which we hope to bring down to the Core tier soon.

-James H, GL Product Manager, Verify:Testing

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#34

Post by aeternum »

sushshshsh wrote: post #5

Metering of services like this only makes sense for organizations that don't have the time or expertise or desire to maintain the open source, self-hosted version themselves. Raspi and similar devices will some day hopefully rid the world of this tyranny of having to trust a website like this and pay them for eternity and hope they dont go down and hope they dont raise prices (oops) and hope they dont obfuscate prici…

It's not tyranny, it's convenience. Our engineers can focus on creating features that provide more benefit than an in-house build system.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#35

Post by riyadparvez »

jstummbillig wrote: post #15
avolcano wrote: post #4

$4/mo for 2000 minutes is reasonable. GitHub Actions does 2000 minutes for free/3000 minutes for $4, wonder if they'll drop their free tier a bit without the competition.

Alas, I doubt they care much. Post-Microsoft-acquisition-GitHub is playing a different game.

> Post-Microsoft-acquisition-GitHub is playing a different game.

Excatly. Microsoft owned GitHub is more interested into getting more customers for Azure than GitHub itself.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#36

Post by viro »

sushshshsh wrote: post #25
viro wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't understand what he is complaining about.

I'm suggesting that $4 per month where I have to estimate the number of requests I will actually make is actually not that good of a value compared to self hosting on a raspberry pi. The devices will pay for themselves within the first year and generally my philosophy is to avoid building your operation around 50 services cobbled together because there is a possibility you will spend more dev time trying to understan…

Fair enough, I know I self host everything. I would just suggest that a pi is probably a bad example. Since its ARM and you would want your ci/cd to run as close to production(x86) as possible.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#38

Post by mumblerino »

nrclark wrote: post #22

I've never really understood "minutes" as a unit of build work. What kind of server are we talking about? What CPU? How much RAM? How fast is the storage access? Is my instance virtualized? And if so, do I have dedicated resources? I have a build that takes around 70 minutes on an 8-core i9 with 32 GB of RAM and M.2 SSDs. What does that translate into for Gitlab "minutes"?

The point of a service like this is that you should not concern yourself with dirty hardware details.

They give you a certain power for a number of minutes. It seems reasonable.

If they upgrade their servers, they can fit more minutes per machine, or give it away by speeding up runs for free.

If you want to think about “minutes on XYZ machine”, then build your own CI on AWS and pay exactly what you want.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#39

Post by nscalf »

For smaller projects who aren't ready to start spending yet, it's pretty trivial to spin up your own runners on a server. Not sure how it scales, but Gitlab has pretty solid guides on how to make one. It took me maybe an hour the last time I looked at it, worth checking out. Definitely easier to drop $10 than maintain that though, I'm a fan of Gitlab's CI/CD infrastructure.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#40

Post by jchw »

vkgfx wrote: post #23
bachmeier wrote: post #16

Their existing policy has never made sense to me. You can only give away so much stuff on a free plan. I don't think CI/CD is cheap. Buying extra minutes for $10 (not per month) is completely reasonable. At some point I feel uncomfortable using a free plan that is obviously unsustainable.

> At some point I feel uncomfortable using a free plan that is obviously unsustainable. This describes how I've felt about Discord for years.

You can pay for Discord. Admittedly, I do. It's not that Discord is perfect, I have a lot of personal gripes with it. But it's still significantly better than where I came from (Skype) and I use it a lot so it seems fair enough. Discord Nitro also thankfully pivoted from being a games service and the features it does provide are nice to have. (Larger file uploads, better stream quality, cross-server emoji.)
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